Another cold

Last week my cough was finally starting to get better, and although I was a bit congested, things were starting to look up in that respect. Then, unfortunately, Jeff and I both came down with a new cold, which we caught from our colleague's two-and-a-half-year-old.  This one is a bit more traditional in its appearance – sore throat, congestion, runny nose, and the like. I am really hoping that this doesn't linger too long. It has been over a month since I first decided to go to the doctor because my cough was getting worse, and I don't want this cold last for quite so long!

Yesterday was therefore spent doing very little. That was actually quite nice – just sitting around at home for the most part. At the end of the day we went to have dinner with friends at their house, which was a bit more effort, but also meant we didn't have to cook dinner which was a bonus.

Yesterday morning I made a batch of pie crust dough, and today made a small rhubarb pie with rhubarb that was harvested and frozen earlier this summer from our garden. It is small only in that instead of putting a top crust on it, I just folded over the bottom crust to make sort of a free-form shape in the pie pan, but it's pretty much a full-sized one crust pie. I am very much looking forward to having it for dessert tonight.

Tomorrow is my last day at work before going on leave. I thought that perhaps I would not even go in tomorrow, but there are still a few loose ends to tie up, and things to bring home from the office, like my plant which will not survive a year of neglect. My mind is still in work mode, as I have been working quite hard for the last little while, but I am hoping that after tomorrow I will be able to fully shift my focus to being at home and to baby.

Lots of people at this stage are just ready for the baby to come already, but I really want the three more weeks I have until my due date. I want time to mentally prepare, to read a bit more from some of my books (I particularly want to finish the book I'm reading about breastfeeding, and read a little bit about newborn sleep), to finish knitting the baby sweater I started, and if there is time, to cook a bit more for stocking the freezer. I actually really want to make some cookie dough and put it in the freezer, which doesn't take much time but which won't happen if the baby shows up too soon. At the same time, I don't want the baby to come too late because my mom is coming out a week after my due date, and it would be nice if the baby was here for her visit!

So, if I could have it my way the baby would show up right on time, but it turns out the chances of that are fairly low. There is about a 4% chance of a baby arriving on its due date, and any time between today and five weeks from today would be considered quite normal. It's hard not knowing how much time I have, and because of that not really being able to decide how to spend my time. I'm not used to this, but I think it is probably just a small taste of the uncertainty that we are about to experience :-)

Hot and cold

We are in the final month before my due date, and all of the major important baby prep things are done. It's a good thing they are, because I am less and less able to do things. I have one more busy week at work, and then that will mostly be done too, although there may be a couple of things that I have to deal with from home after my maternity leave officially starts. I am starting to feel like we are prepared in the sense that we have done all the things we are supposed to do, but everyone tells us that we will never really be prepared because having a baby is not something that you can understand or prepare for until you do it. So that is where we are at the moment.

The part about me being less and less able to do things stems from me getting bigger and bigger, my feet being swollen more often, and generally being very easily fatigued. Our regular obstetrician was on vacation last week and so we saw someone else from the office, and she noted that I was "measuring big" and that although my regular obstetrician had said it was still within the normal range on previous visits, on this visit she thought that my growth was rapid enough to warrant an extra ultrasound to make sure that everything was okay. So I had an ultrasound on Thursday, and depending on where you look and what statistics you go with, the baby is measuring within the normal range, but somewhere around the 90th percentile. So there are no problems (like extra amniotic fluid or other things that can be signs of a problem), just a big baby. I feel kind of huge, and it is a little bit validating to be told that yes indeed I am kind of huge in an objective sense. But I am happy that the baby seems to be healthy, and it is certainly better to have a baby who is measuring big than measuring small, because even if the baby were born today it probably would not be considered low birth weight :-)

One slight issue/battle that is going on in our house at the moment is that I am constantly hot, which means that Jeff is constantly cold. The air-conditioning is set to a level that is colder then Jeff would prefer, and this has been the same all summer. This morning was a very crisp cold morning for August, and I decided it would be a good idea to take advantage and open a bunch of windows. This brought the temperature of the house down below even what the air-conditioning is normally set at, and Jeff has been freezing all day long. I normally like things warm, and normally get kind of annoyed when the air-conditioning is on all the time, but I now have a new appreciation for what it is like to be hot. Being more than 30 pounds heavier than I usually am, it doesn't matter how little I am wearing, I can't seem to get cool enough. I brought ice packs to bed last night even though the temperature outside was down to about 5°C/41°F. Jeff does not like that he has to wear a sweater indoors in the summer. I totally get his point of view, but right now if the house is not cold, I am beyond uncomfortable. I told Jeff that this will only last for a few more weeks, and he asked what if it never goes back to normal. Thinking about it, if that were to happen, it would be an awfully good thing that we live in Saskatchewan so that at least I can be comfortable in the winter!

Two weeks, three weeks, five weeks

It is just two weeks until I start my maternity leave. I can hardly believe that I will really be off work for a year starting September 1, and it scares me a bit how much work has to get done before then. But, I also know that if things don't get done the world will not end. I had planned to really not have anything left to do by this point, but things didn't work out that way. I have been working more slowly these past few weeks, so things that I thought should be done by now are not done. It is also the case that certain things out of my control have held things up (both of my graduate students are being held up by bureaucratic issues, and I hope all of this is resolved within the next two weeks).

Today we also prepared the garden for harvest in three weeks. Jeff cut down what was remaining of the potato plants so the potatoes can start the process of "hardening off," so that when we harvest them the skins will be a little tougher and they will be ready for storage. I went out and bought a soaker hose today so that we can continue watering the parts of the garden that still need water, while no longer watering the potatoes. We finally got our first two zucchinis today (one green and one yellow), as previous ones rotted before they were ready to pick due to blossom end rot. It seems that this problem has disappeared, and I am hopeful that we will see lots of zucchini in the next few weeks.

Going out shopping was a bit exhausting (even though it was an extremely short and easy trip), as was helping Jeff lay down the soaker hose (it had to be secured with landscaping pins, and we had to sort of pass the hose back and forth across the garden beds). These are things that it seems reasonable to be a little bit tired from, but I was totally exhausted. I am definitely moving into that end of pregnancy exhaustion phase. At the same time, I still have my cough, and now have nasal congestion as well. I have never had the experience of a cold starting as a cough and then developing other symptoms afterward. I did go back to the doctor, and she did prescribe a steroid inhaler, which I have been using and which I do think is helping some with my lung irritation. However, it seems pretty clear that this is a virus that is lingering and in some ways getting worse, and I will probably just have to wait it out. I hope it doesn't take too long to get over this, as it is not all that long until the baby will be here!

As of today, it is now five weeks until my due date. There are very few things left for us to do to prepare. One thing we will probably continue to do until the baby comes is stock up on freezer meals. We have been making large batches of food, eating it for one night, and putting all the leftovers in containers in the freezer. A couple of months ago we bought a used upright deep freezer from someone at the University who was moving, and put it in the basement. We had this on our baby to do list, specifically because we wanted to have extra space for food made ahead of time. As of tonight we have thirteen days of dinner for me and Jeff packed away in the freezer, and I think we will probably try to fill every inch of space we can before the baby comes - so that we have options for things to eat and few dishes to wash in the early days when things are hard.

One thing that I am super happy about is that on Friday the wall in back of our shower finally got fixed. We also ended up doing a bit of a shower makeover, and although in some ways it doesn't look all that different, it feels drastically different and I have great peace of mind knowing that it is now structurally sound, and knowing that my grab bars are not going to budge. I took my first standing shower in I don't know how long on Saturday, and it felt extremely relaxing to do so.

Before

Partway through renovation

After

We also did our best to relax a bit this weekend. Yesterday we went for a very leisurely bike ride. Today a good part of the morning was spent in pajamas, and we slept in as well as we could. I am running into a bit of trouble with sleeping, finding that I get lower back pain from laying down all night. It goes away fairly quickly when I get up in the morning, and I don't have any back pain during the day (knock on wood). I seem to wake up a few hours before I would like to, and find that I can't get comfortable in bed no matter what position I put myself into. I have decided that next time this happens I'm going to get up out of bed for a longer time (I usually get up long enough just to go to the bathroom), and see if I can make the back pain go away by standing and moving around or even just sitting.

And as I have been thinking more about comfort and sitting, we decided to move the glider rocking chair from the baby's room into the living room, at least for now. I am thinking that for now, it will be very nice to have a chair that is comfortable for me to sit in with my feet up (and for the past twenty-four hours this indeed has been great), as it seems I need to have my feet up most of the time when I'm sitting in order to avoid having giant swollen feet and ankles. Once the baby comes, if I spend a lot of time in this chair nursing I will be happier to be out in the main area of the house as opposed to in the back corner in the baby room.

Despite some fatigue, difficulty sleeping, and swollen feet, I have not yet reached that point in pregnancy where it feels like I will be pregnant forever, or where I just want the baby out. I am still very much enjoying being pregnant, and once again hope that the baby does not decide to make a surprise early arrival – at least not too early :-)

Maybe I do need a little more rest…

I have been feeling still relatively okay, but a little bit worse and more complainy this week. We started the week with our trip to Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, and did have a nice time. We had a picnic by the lake, went on a short (1.2 km) hike, and Jeff went for a short swim. It took almost as long to get out there as we had time there once we arrived, so it was quite a long drive just for a day trip (over two and a half hours driving each way). But it was quite nice to get out and away from people and away from farms into a more natural landscape.

I have been more tired so I used a crutch instead of a cane or hiking stick even for our short hike – a crutch provides a bit more stability. I also had to stop and rest along the way, which I would say is not typical for such a short walk. It is certainly a combination of all the extra weight I am carrying plus this cough that won't go away.

On Tuesday I went back to the doctor because my cough had gotten worse. The doctor suggested that at this point it was worth trying antibiotics, so I have been on antibiotics since Tuesday and it seems to be having no effect. So chances are it is just a virus, but now my lungs are so irritated that my coughing fits are becoming more violent. We had an appointment with the obstetrician late last week, and she suggested that I might need a steroid inhaler to deal with inflammation. She said this kind of thing is not uncommon in pregnant women whose lungs are being squished from below. I thought I would give the antibiotics a few more days, which it has now been, so I'm going to call about the possibility of getting that inhaler prescribed. When I search for this condition on the Internet, I see some doctors and some studies that say you just have to wait it out and that no intervention is likely to help, but others suggest that in their clinical experience a steroid inhaler is helpful. At this point my lungs feel so raw and irritated that anything that might help seems like a good idea. I am not as positive about this virus as I was a week ago :-)

Also this week my feet once again swelled up to an unnatural size. It seemed relatively unprovoked, but the obstetrician said perhaps it was somehow related to changes in barometric pressure, because she had seen a lot of it this week. So I wore my compression socks for three days, exercised, drank lots of water, and things did improve.

At the same time, I figured out that my wedding band was stuck on my finger. I was hoping it was just due to swelling, but when the swelling went down it was still stuck. It was getting to the point of being quite uncomfortable, and I realized that if I didn't get it off it may soon start to cut off circulation to my finger. In all the pregnancy books and apps that I have, not one of them made it clear that it was really necessary to take your rings off every day to make sure that they did not get stuck. So if there is anyone reading this who has not been pregnant before and will be pregnant in the future, be vigilant about your rings. I tried many tricks including making my finger slipperier with moisturizer and cooking oil, icing my finger to make it shrink, and spraying glass cleaner on it (I did not think this would work, but other people on the Internet said they were skeptical but it turned out to be the only thing that helped). None of these things worked; the ring was still stubbornly stuck.

So as a last resort I tried something that seemed a bit barbaric, but better than having the ring cut off. It involves using dental floss to squish a little bit of your finger at a time just above the ring, then moving the ring up to that squished spot, unraveling the dental floss, and moving up slightly. At first it seemed hopeless, but slowly I did make progress. I continued to ice my finger throughout this process, partly because it helped keep it small, and partly because I had heard that this method can result in quite a bit of bruising. Eventually I was able to slide my ring off, but it was a fairly painful process. However, I am realizing that the ring had been digging into my skin for a while and it feels much better having it off. This is a picture of my hand, taken today, twenty-four hours after I took my ring off, and you can see on my ring finger that there is still an indentation from where the ring was.

So as much as it was a somewhat unpleasant process to remove the ring, it really does feel much better now.

I think the lesson this week is that right now I really do have to slow down whether I want to or not. With the level of fatigue I felt on our short walk on Monday, my cough, my swollen feet, etc., I am finding I have no choice but to rest a bit more. Yesterday the son of one of our colleagues had his bar mitzvah, and I went to the (long boring) part in the morning (the actual bar mitzvah as part of the Shabbat service), but was so tired that I had to stay home from the fun part (the evening reception with a buffet dinner held at the science center, complete with a demonstration about how to make ice cream with liquid nitrogen). Jeff went, and won a mug and a CD for his air guitar skills, and it sounded like a great time. However, there was just no way I would have held up being anywhere but on the couch in my pajamas.

I was expecting this, and the planning for this, but somehow have been feeling so good that I thought maybe the fatigue would never hit. And maybe once I kick this cough I will go back to feeling pretty good, or maybe this is just a sign that the end of pregnancy is nigh…

Slowing down

This was a fairly uneventful week, and yet still quite busy. Somehow we had things to do every evening this week, Monday through Thursday, plus there was work like normal. However, I do think that things are starting to slow down.

First, we had a date night on Friday for the first time in a while. We went out to eat at a popular and nice but fairly casual restaurant, then came home and worked on a puzzle. Not necessarily super exciting from some standards, but a very good date night for us :-)

On Friday I worked from home because I wasn't feeling so well. I have had a cough intermittently for quite a while (maybe two weeks?), and it seemed like it was starting to get worse. I have never had a cough like this, where it came on without any other cold symptoms, started out where I was coughing maybe twice a day, and now has progressively gotten to where I'm coughing a lot and it is, as they say, "productive." I went to the doctor on Friday afternoon, and was told it is probably just a virus and not to worry about it unless it gets worse. If this is my cold for the year, I'll take it – this is probably the least sick sickness I have ever had :-)

This weekend Jeff has been doing his best to get me to rest, as that is what was prescribed by the doctor (along with plenty of fluids, and fresh air outside of air-conditioned buildings). He says that yesterday I did not do such a great job, and he gave me a grade of B- on relaxing. He says it would have been a grade of C except that he knows I was trying. So today I decided to try to do better, and with much coaching from Jeff I think I have succeeded – I spent the entire afternoon just reading and knitting. This morning I made ice cream, and after dinner we made some homemade veggie burgers to put in the freezer, but other than that I have not been working too hard.

Tomorrow is a holiday here (Saskatchewan Day, which exists I think only because there is no other holiday in August), and we are planning to head out to a provincial park for the day. It is one we have not been to before, and hopefully it is a lovely and relaxing time!